.

June 29, 2008

In a textbook-perfect videogame design, difficulty ramps up slowly and culminates in some event that's both narratively and technically climactic, so that, at the end, the player can stand over the game's tombstone and say "You were my greatest rival.... and my greatest friend." Another good move is to hide the really difficult parts of your game in parts where only the insanely dedicated will find them. It's best if the stupidity of the difficulty matches the stupidity of the player. I'm a really dumb guy.

The fifteenth mission of Super Robot Wars Original Generation 2 (videos are from the Playstation 2 remake but I am playing it on the Game Boy Advance) is, at face value, unwinnable. After the first two turns of warming up on some random suckers, the real enemies appear on the map. These guys are bosses that you shouldn't be fighting in earnest until the end of the game, and you've got four fresh units: no upgrades, no custom weapons, and they aren't even the robots you've been using up until now. None is particularly overpowering: you have two custom Gespensts (SRW's basic cannon-fodder robot, but with nicer toys), the Valcione girly-super-robot, and your mothership, the Hiryu Custom. Nothing too fancy. Relatively speaking.

It's quickly established, as they kill all your (random sucker) allies, that your main party has no chance against them. If you're hit even once by these guys, you're probably going to die, and in this mission, a single unit down means game over. The game literally shows you the door (the right edge of the map), and all your characters tell each other to get the hell out of there. If you do, the mission simply ends. It's a typical Japanese RPG setup, where you run into an invincible enemy so as to make your endgame victory that much sweeter.

However, these guys can actually be beaten. There's a large area on this map that will replenish 30% of your HP and energy at the start of every turn: this allows you to hole the party up in a corner and whittle away at the bosses until they die. This is much easier said than done: allow the bosses into this area, for example, and they will gain more HP per turn than you can ever hope to take away, effectively making them invincible. They must be lured in to a safe distance, from which the silly computer will attack forever without thinking to move to the space that would guarantee victory.

Each boss has an unspecified amount of HP that is not displayed onscreen until you have them down to 99,999 HP, the most the game will show any one unit as having. The damage you will do to the enemy in a turn, meanwhile, ranges from 5 to 15 thousand HP. This isn't so bad, so far. It's a battle of attrition but it's still doable.

But this is the killer. As the boss robots and their pilots are far superior to yours, they are extremely hard to hit (you'll often have a one-in-three chance to hit), and it is extremely easy for you to be hit by them (they usually have a two-in-three chance or better). If a robot is hit, it dies and the game ends. Only the mothership can take a hit from one of these guys, and it can only take three or four.

These are not odds that can be overcome by simply being lucky: you have to save before every single attack, making sure to nail your one-in-three chance to hit, and then your one-in-three chance to stay alive. If you fail, you turn the game off, turn it back on again, wait for the title screen to come up, and reload your game. You do this over and over again, and the odds get progressively worse as the bosses' HP goes down. It's not really unfair to exploit the engine this way: this fight is very deliberately scripted and the designers are well aware that the reload strategy is the only way you can kill these enemies. This mission is a deliberate act of sadism. I didn't bother with it on my first run through the game, but I did on my second, and subsequently never played the game again.

Thursday night I was coming back home from a party, and I recognized that perhaps I'd had a few too many pints to play Shiren effectively. I thought immediately of OG2, the other game in my DS, and this ridiculous boss fight. With its mindless, boring, tedious strategy, it was the perfect entertainment for my inebriated state. I elected-- a bit optimistically-- to finish it then and there. I didn't get all that far, but I remember, as I got off the subway, being a little amazed at how much progress I'd made towards killing the bosses. An hour of nothing-else-to-do-in-the-world will do this.

I spent the next day housesitting at my brother's new apartment, waiting for the cable company. After I'd exhausted my available resources-- watching all of GTA4's TV shows and the beautiful mess Karas in its entirety-- and the cable company got later and later on their appointment, I turned to the DS. I could have played Shiren, but Mission 15 was really bothering me. I elected, this time, to really finish it then and there. I turned off the TV, sat down and got to it. It took me three hours. The cable guy still didn't show up.

When you beat the last of the three bosses. (and it has to be this guy last, or you get nothing for your troubles), he speaks directly to the player in that weird literally translated anime character language:

June 25, 2008

I know it's a small field and a low bar, but that doesn't mean Takashi Miike doesn't deserve some kind of fancy prize shaped like Sonic the Hedgehog for this movie. Miike was the best possible call to direct an adaptation of Sega's gangster game Ryu ga Gotoku (here released as Yakuza), as there's nothing the man-- perhaps best known here for his adaptation of the ultraultraviolent manga Ichi the Killer-- does better than yakuza and cartoonish excess.

Our hero is standard badass Kazuma Kiryu: as the player character of a videogame, he is an unstoppable ass-kicking monster who we first see casually beating the shit out of a small army of rival gangsters in a supermarket. Supermarkets! They're great places to get in a fight! He's trying to find a little girl's mom, who is apparently tangled up in some crazy missing-money business. Meanwhile, a rival gangster who struts around town posing and clubbing everything in front of him with a baseball bat is hunting down his old friend Kiryu-chan, who he heard just got out of the joint and who he really, really wants to have an awesome fight to the death with. These people-- and the police, government agents, and a whole town of other assorted crazies-- eventually all collide in a big mess of gunpowder and blood and gut punches and baseballs and broken bones. Who wins? The viewer!

Steve told me it's crazy faithful to the game, down to the locations and the moves in the fight scenes. He also pointed out the cameo by Sega designer Toshihiro Nagoshi. I'm a bad Sega fan because I still haven't played this game yet. Shame on me. I'll tell you this, though: the film has an amazing "videogame moment" that's too good to spoil. Plus sweet yakuza music. I'd really love the soundtrack to this movie: I would walk really slowly down the street with it playing. I would lean back and cock my head sideways and swagger.

In summary, you cannot afford to miss a movie with a shotgun Mexican standoff.

I must have watched the trailer (scroll down and hit the button under the title screen to watch) for this show six or seven times, and
it kind of made me worry how they were handling it. The announcer goes to great lengths to tell you how very popular the show is (that Japanese licensor mentality in which a big Japanese hit makes for an equally big everywhere-else hit), but there isn't a word about why this show is popular, or more importantly, why it is fun. Their idea of fun is a shot of the Amazon.jp sales charts.

The only hint of the show's greatness in this trailer is a speech "to all the international buyers" made by the show's charming goof of a host in cue-card English. This part isn't even on the website, so I'm going to link you to the Youtube cellphone bootleg.Let's see how long that link lasts!

So, Game Center CX, retitled to Retro Game Master and shown to me in a theater for free. Not a bad deal. It's a TV show where they put a man in a room with a videogame and they don't let him out until he's won. This is a more entertaining prospect than you'd think! "Retro Game Master" is either sarcastic or a misnomer, as the whole point of the show is that Arino is an likable, average guy and he's not very good at videogames. This show is about chuckling along with Arino's many failures and the cruelty of 8-bit games, rooting for him as he presses on, sticks cold compresses on his forehead, and hits the "a-ha" moments where he figures out how the game works. In the endgame you feel a real vicarious sense of accomplishment for the guy, in a situation where he may or may not win. You can get a superplay anywhere, after all. This is a slightly dramatized version of the experience of playing a videogame, with all the ups and downs that entails.

So now that you have the idea, I'll tell you what I watched. This time, Arino played the NES version of Ghouls n' Ghosts, one of the meanest games of its day. If you're as well acquainted with Ghouls n' Ghosts as I was as a child, you already know what the final gotcha is. You're probably already laughing thinking of it. I know I was. Retro Game Master dubs the narrator and subtitles Arino's exploits, much in the same fashion as magnificent spectacles Ninja Warrior and Unbeatable Banzuke (I'm sorry, the only available videos on Youtube are uploaded by those dumbasses who think you capture video by holding a camcorder in front of a TV UGH PET INTERNET PEEVE OVER HERE). The narration very effectively matches the straight-faced enthusiasm and completely un-called-for seriousness of the Japanese narrator. He makes Arino's struggle with Red Arremer in the first stage into a real all-or-nothing battle between mortal enemies, which only makes Arino getting killed over and over by him even funnier. Arino himself has a pretty tough time this episode: he has an assistant come help him out, and even has to go home and practice up for "homework".

What's really unfortunate here is that the releasing company, Stylejam, has seen fit to chop out the bits where Arino does things that aren't playing videogames: in this episode we miss out on an arcade visit and an interview with Yu Suzuki(!!). I hope that this was done simply to fit the show into a 30-minute showing, and that we don't lose these bits if the show goes to TV (they would almost certainly cut these scenes for TV broadcast) or DVD. It would be a real shame, and would likely kill the sales of the DVD project before it even got started. That said, Retro Game Master is a great show, and I wish Stylejam all the best in getting it released. Fully intact, you guys!

Meanwhile, in case that doesn't work out, TV-Nihon is fansubbing, and they're cutting out everything but the game part too! For shame!

June 24, 2008

I'm not even gonna deny it or anything: my favorite thing about this adaptation of Osamu Tezuka's manga is Kou Shibasaki's fantastic performance as the title character, a funny little thief who talks and acts like a tough guy (in the manga, Dororo was a boy) and has mud on her face all the time. I freely admit to being totally moemoe for her.

That said, I was surprised by just how good this movie was! Dororo is a big-budget and beautifully-made adaptation of the sort I wasn't really ready for when I sat down in the theater. My eyes were quite pleasantly shocked by a visual style that's hard to describe. Not a Tezuka comic brought to life, but a place somewhere in between: a colorful but not saccharine reality populated, occassionally, by CG monsters that do in fact look like they stepped off the comic page. I've never read Dororo (Vertical is putting it out soon!), but as soon as you see these guys, if you know Tezuka, you'll stop and say "Ah, now that's Tezuka." You could certainly argue that they clash-- particularly during a rubber-suit fight that I loved more than all the others put together-- but I think that in a very surreal way, they mesh.

Dororo is about a young man by the name of Hyakkimaru, whose body was sacrificed to demons in 48 parts by his father before birth. Baby Hyakkimaru was found, had replacement parts fitted to him (suspend your disbelief already!), and grew up to search for the parts he lost by killing the demons who hold them. At the beginning of the movie, he's joined by Dororo, who we've talked about. The movie deals with family realtionships throughout and climaxes with a conflicted Hyakkimaru finding and fighting the father who betrayed him.

Overall, I would say that Dororo is the best movie I watched this weekend. I can't find a single flaw with it: everything it sets out to do, it does just right. The fantasy world is gorgeously realized, the action is top-notch, and the emotion is genuine. Learning that this is the first of a planned trilogy was the best news I've had all week.

From the description, I expected The Bodyguard (not that The Bodyguard, the Thai one) to be like a jokey Hard Boiled. Then I walked into the movie. During the opening shootout scene, I decided I was watching the HK action movie equivalent Hot Shots. The tone is way out in parody-land: right away we get a pack of goofy-looking dudes with straight faces strutting in hysterically arbitrary and overdone slow-motion. The shootout itself alternates between the awesome wire effects and slidin' around you know from Chow-Yun Fat movies and classic throw-your-buddy-around slapstick, culminating in four cars crashing into each other in midair for reasons I am not entirely sure of. Pretty great flick, right? Right.

What's surprising is that this is the biggest gunfight in the movie. While The Bodyguard is a pretty crazy action movie, it's not a wall-to-wall action movie, like a Fist of Legend or Hard Boiled or that kind of thing, where the violence just never stops and we love the film for it. The Bodyguard is actually a really dry satire: it makes me think of Cromartie High, in that it takes on a genre with a lot of crazy, silly shit going on (a long shot where a water gun is fired into a man's ass repeatedly) with a total deadpan delivery that cannot avoid hilarity. More of the laughs-- and the biggest laughs-- are thanks to the smart script than the physical gags. The theater was in stitches.

This isn't to say that the action scenes are in any way lacking: choreographed by Ong-Bak'sPanna Rittikrai, these fights are both comically ridiculous and quite entertaining in and of themselves. The Bodyguard opts for a full course of action movie parody, climaxing in a three-part slapstick ode to the martial arts movie. The plot drags at times, but the film makes up for it in goofy guys trying to look cool, violence, pratfalls, and explosions. All this, and Tony Jaa kicking the shit out of people in a supermarket! What more does one need?

I don't know if there's any kind of domestic video release of this: when I talked to a staffer at the Oneechanbara afterparty, he told me they'd been trying to get permission to show it for the past three years. Good on them, because this movie really needs to be seen. By you. Think about it this way: before I saw this movie, I didn't even know I needed to see it. It's a really terrifying thought.

June 21, 2008

Really and truly. Oneechanbara was a budget PS2 game in D3 Publisher's Simple line (full disclosure: I have not played Oneechanbara) whose selling point was the character you see to the left of you chopping up zombies. It obviously sold big numbers despite being not really that great, and grew into a small franchise for developer Tamsoft (of bygone Toshinden fame). Perhaps the culmination of all this Oneechanbara love is this live-action film, which I caught the premiere of last night at the New York Asian Film Festival. Oneechanbara-- again, the tale of a hot bikini girl in a cowboy hat and a feather boa dismembering the living dead-- is certainly ridiculous enough to translate to some fantastic trash cinema. Indeed, Oneechanbara might have been better off as a movie in the first place. Still, I'm wary of Japanese action films in general (Kitamura aside: I love that guy), so I came in with low expectations. This movie still managed to disappoint me.

Anyway, at some near-future point, the D3 Corporation--I and some other guy chuckled-- has flooded the world with zombies and obviously, this chick kills them all. Accompanied by a comic-relief fat guy, Aloof Girl (our heroine Aya) and Nice Girl (her shotgun-wielding biker friend Reiko) set out to kill Dr. Wily and his henchschoolgirl, Aya's sister Saki. And they're all really weepy about it.

The biggest problem with this movie is that it decides to involve itself deeply with the characters' emotional trauma as a result of the zombie outbreak. Much of the movie is spent either drawn-out explanations of people's tragic pasts or people crying about said tragic pasts (protip: they've all had to kill a zombified family member). This concept does not exactly lend itself to high drama. Neither do these actors. Neither does the direction, which outright bludgeons the viewer with forced, mawkish "cry here" scenes. The audience was absolutely rolling from laughter during these bits, but I've seen The Room, so I can't say I was moved. I was just thinking "these people could be fighting zombies, right now".

And then there's the business of fighting zombies! Aya often fights in the dark, and this means that a lot of the fights-- indeed, the entire first twenty minutes of the film-- are shot in "can't see shit" vision. You can't really see Aya (absolutely criminal, as ogling the girls is one of the film's few sources of genuine entertainment), you can't see what's in front of her, you can't see what she's doing: a lot of the swordplay is fudged by just putting cheap videogame slash effects over the screen. For Oneechanbara, the movie is surprisingly light on the gore, and many of Aya's cuts are clean zombie-fall-down affairs. The action only really validates the movie at the very end, with a good-times zombie massacre that finally fulfilled the simple expectations I had for it. If you see this on video, do yourself a favor and skip to the shot where they're outside what I call "Dr. Wily's castle". You'll see it.

So basically, Oneechanbara: THE MOVIE gets zombie violence wrong, it gets tits and ass wrong (for Christ's sake why is she wearing a coat all the time), it gets drama wrong, and at the end they rip off Fist of the North Star. Why, guys? This could have been so good! I actually found myself repeatedly wishing that I was watching the live-action Cutie Honey movie. I would, however, like to extend thanks to NYAFF and Kirin for the free-beer afterparty, where I got my ticket's worth by filling myself up to the brim with sweet, sweet Kirin Ichiban. Hey Kirin, if you guys ever want to, say, sponsor showings of Machine Robo at my house with crates of your lovely nectar.... well, I'm just saying that's on the table. We could do that.

I also saw The Bodyguard, of course, and it was fantastic. A real post on that one is forthcoming. Meanwhile, tomorrow I'll be at a showing of Retro Game Master, the localization of Game Center CX, and the live-action remake of Osamu Tezuka's Dororo. Tomorrow night is another videogame adaptation, Takashi Miike's take on Sega's Ryu ga Gotoku (Yakuza). I'll be catching other movies as the fest continues, but that's about all for my weekend.

June 19, 2008

Holy shit! A-Next is this weekend, but who cares? These movies look incredible! Just off the top, I'm definitely going to the videogame movies-- Oneechanbara and Ryu ga Gotoku-- and the adaptation of Tezuka's Dororo. And, yeah, they're playing that "guy from Death Note" movie but I don't have high hopes for it. But it's not all "movies I have to see because they say videogame on them" either! Just look at Dainipponjin. Do I need to explain the appeal of Dainipponjin? I think not! I'm particularly interested in the Thai "Bodyguard" series, which, according to the site, is

"so
straight it’s bent, serving up a world where no one has eyes - only
sunglasses. Where all glass is meant to be shattered by bullets and
where dialogue such as, “Lily, you sleep like a transvestite being
raped,” somehow makes sense. Close-ups are piled on top of close-ups,
and even the slow motion is shot in slow motion, as cliches are piled
up on top of each other until both movies are a fractured series of
action movie set pieces stacked into an absurdly hilarious tower of
babel with Mum Jokmok leaping off the top, naked and on fire, a blazing
.45 in each hand."

To which I say, YES. THIS IS THE MOVIE I WANT IN MY LIFE. The action movies on display here look absolutely berserker and I can't wait to watch them all, then tell you how awesome they were.

June 15, 2008

It feels really good to beat a Mystery Dungeon game because you've already died so many times. You've gotten so damned close to the end, but you didn't have enough food, or you were hypnotized, or you stepped on some trap that got you killed, or you made some goddamn boneheaded call that you should have known better than to do, but now you're dead and there's nothing you can do about it.

One of the big reasons I like Mystery Dungeon-- and, indeed, roguelikes as a genre-- is that death carries weight. This is also the point at which reviewers start to bitch and moan, and as such Mystery Dungeon games are always critically panned when they get US releases.

I'm going to give it to you straight: these people are pussies.

In Mystery Dungeon, when you die, you are transported to the first town, lose all of your items and equipment, go back to level 1, and start the game over. You are expected to die. In fact, on your first several runs, you will die, and it's best to leave any really strong equipment you find behind in a storehouse so that you don't lose it forever. People say that this makes Mystery Dungeon not fun, but I would argue the exact opposite. If you kept your experience and loot in Mystery Dungeon, it would be like every other Japanese RPG: you would completely overpower the dungeon and the game would be over in two hours. It would be a completely thoughtless, painless exercise. It wouldn't be any fun at all.

Shiren is engaging precisely because the stakes are so high. Everything is randomly generated. Usually there's a way to make it out alive, but sometimes there really isn't! You have to be able to tell when you have a shot at winning and when you don't: often you can simply be dealt a bad hand. Your inventory space is pretty limited, so you've got to be very careful about what you take with you. Everything you pick up has some kind of use, and most items have more than one use. Play cleverly and thoughtfully, and you shall be rewarded. Without the severe death penalty, you wouldn't learn anything. You wouldn't bother being clever or thoughtful or anything. You'd just win, and it would be empty. Mysterious Dungeon, on the other hand, is an adventure. You make the story. You fight for your life. You are involved.

Beating Shiren for the first time was really satisfying. After 30-some failed attempts, I was having a good run. I had found a small arsenal of magic items (including an invincibility herb that I have never seen again since) and an unusual amount of storage jars, so I decided to pull my rust-proofed, heavily upgraded sword and shield (the set you save for just such an occassion) out of storage and make a serious run to beat the game. I was still quite vulnerable. There were still a lot of near-death situations. Instead of fighting through the last three floors, I simply ran towards the last boss and unloaded all my spells on him and his entourage. Then I ate my invincibility herb and, without any trouble, I calmly beat the final boss to death. It felt damn good.

And you know what else? The game is only 20 bucks. Go buy it. God, would you look at that box art, though? A real shame. Welcome back to the early 90's, Sega. For some more about Shiren check out this wonderfully thorough post from GameSetWatch's @play column, which is all about roguelikes. And if you want to GET ANGRY, they link to those reviews I was talking about. Or you can read this magnificent NeoGAF rave. It's all you!

Get your internets ready! As part of the Gurren-Lagann movie project, there's also a Gurren-Lagann music video project, where different animators do little alternate-universe GL stories set to various background music from the series. I was thinking I'd have to wait a year or two to see these, but lucky for everybody, Gainax is streaming them.One will go up every week. The first features the Gurren-dan in a generic middle-ages world and is set to what is by far my favorite Gurren song, "Rap is the Soul of a Man! Perk Up Your Earholes and Listen REAL Close
to the Theme of Lord Kamina, the Man of Raging Billows Who Believes in
Himself and Points to Heaven!!" For your own sake, wait about ten minutes before watching: the video loads very slowly.

June 14, 2008

Here is a setlist that I've overlooked, from two Japanese tour dates back in February. They're a bit different from the Taipei set list. I am only going to link to songs that aren't already on the last list.

1. No Border
2. Rocks
~MC
3. Stormbringer
4. Genkai Battle: The internet seems to think this is from Naruto but it's from Yu-Gi-Oh. It's from something lame, but it's not from something THAT lame, jeez.
5. Dead or Alive
~MC
6. Shuraki: This is the theme song for a line of moe PVC figures (warning: link contains plastic cheesecake photography)
7. Garo ~Savior in the Dark
8. Asu e no Houkou
9. Divine Love: This is the theme song from one'a them pretty-boy animu.
10. Salvage:
ED for the Galaxy Angel II game. Not really a bad song (BELIEVE YOUR
LOOOOOOOOVE WHOAOOAAOAOA BELIEVE YOUR LOOOOOVE WHOOOOO) but I'm trying
to forget the whole Galaxy Angel II/Rune fiasco ever existed, so if you
guys wanna skip this one...
11. Rising Force:
2nd OP for the SRW TV series. Just not as balls-out "I AM RUNNING INTO THE FUTURE" awesome as Break
Out, but I guess whenever you say, "HEY YOU GUYS! NEVER GONNA GIVE UUUUP" you're kind of cool.
~MC
12. Kurenai no Kiba (acoustic)
13. Garimpeiro (acoustic): Original song: Garimpeiro, in Brazil, means someone who seeks gold or precious stones. The Wounded Man
is a garimpeiro. Jam Project is looking for the human treasures of
courage, friendship and love, but Wounded Man only cares about
bitches and money.
~MC
14. Dragon Storm 2007: This is a cover of the official theme song of a Japanese wrestling promotion that I would watch the hell out of. I can't find it to stream for you, but JAM improved it by saying DRAGON STOOOOOOORM over and over again. Akagi IS the Dragon Storm.
15. Battle Communication!!
~MC
16. Portal
17. Break Out
18. Victory
19. Soultaker
20. Hero
~Encore
21. EN1. Hagane no Messiah
22. EN2. Gong
~Double Encore
23. EN3. Skill

As you can see, the really important stuff is the same, and the solos at the Taipei show weren't done at the Japan shows. The setlist we get in lovely Baltimore will probably look much more like the Taipei show than this one. All for the better, far as I'm concerned.